iPhoto News: Nikon’s Z5IIC, Lightroom’s Prompt to Edit – October 2026

Welcome to the first iPhoto News of October. Nikon has made a full-frame camera with beginners squarely in mind, Adobe has taught Lightroom to take instructions in plain English, and two of the year’s big photography competitions have named their winners.

There are six stories this time, and closer to home there is news about the camera shop most of us in the UK grew up walking past.

Put the kettle on and let’s get into it.

Nikon’s Z5IIC is a full-frame camera made for casual shooters

Nikon announced the Z5IIC in the last week of September, and it pairs a 24.5-megapixel full-frame sensor with a flatter, simpler body that has no viewfinder at all. You compose on the rear screen, the way most people already do on a phone.

Nikon says the C stands for casual. It keeps in-body stabilisation rated at up to 7.5 stops in the centre of the frame, reaches 30 frames a second in its JPEG-only high-speed mode, and is the first full-frame Nikon mirrorless camera to include Scene Modes, 15 of them.

It costs $1,399.95 for the body or $1,699.95 with the 24-50mm kit zoom, and it is due to ship in mid-October.

Scene Modes get sneered at by experienced photographers, but they are a sensible way in. Pick the portrait or landscape mode, look at the settings the camera chose, and you have a free lesson in why those settings suit that subject.

The missing viewfinder is the real trade. Composing at arm’s length is harder in bright sun and with long lenses, so if you can, try one in a shop before you buy. For anybody moving up from a phone who wants the low-light quality of a full-frame sensor, it is a tempting first camera.

Learn what those settings do with our Photography for Beginners course

Lightroom will now edit a photo from a sentence you type

Adobe released Lightroom version 9.6 on 29 September with a new feature called Prompt to Edit. You describe the change you want in a sentence, or pick one of Adobe’s suggested prompts, and Google’s Nano Banana image model carries it out. It is an early-access feature, and each edit uses Adobe’s generative credits.

The examples Adobe and the early reviews point to are jobs like clearing dust from old scans or adding colour to black and white family pictures. Adobe says the same update also gives cleaner Reflection Removal results on glass and water.

Be clear about what is going on, though. A generative model makes new pixels, so the result is the AI’s version of your photo rather than your photo with the sliders moved.

For restoring a damaged print that may be exactly what you want, but for your own pictures the ordinary sliders still teach you far more about light.

A diving gannet wins Bird Photographer of the Year

British photographer Henley Spiers has won Bird Photographer of the Year 2026 with Sunball Rocket, a northern gannet diving into the sea off Scotland. The winners were announced in late September, and Henley takes home £3,000 from more than 24,000 images entered.

A bird plunging into the sea gives you a fraction of a second, so a picture like this comes from patience, a fast shutter speed and knowing where the birds will fish. The encouraging part for UK readers is that it was taken in British waters rather than on an expensive trip abroad.

A Shark Nebula takes Astronomy Photographer of the Year

The Royal Observatory Greenwich named the winners of Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2026 in mid-September. The overall title went to Ali Alobaidly for The Quiet Predator, a deep-sky picture of the Shark Nebula that won the Stars and Nebulae category.

The one I would send a beginner to is Stefano Pellegrini’s Botswana Star Trail, winner of the Skyscapes category. Star trails need no telescope, just a tripod, a wide lens and a long run of exposures on a clear night, and the winning pictures have been on show at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich since 18 September.

Affinity 3.3 improves the free editor’s RAW tools

Canva released Affinity 3.3 on 15 September. The update improves RAW development, lets you save RAW presets that work across all your documents, adds separate hue and saturation curves, and brings a dedicated workspace for astrophotography.

The app itself stays free on Mac and Windows, although its AI tools need a paid Canva subscription. If the cost of a Lightroom subscription has put you off editing your RAW files, this is a good moment to give it a try.

Jessops has a new owner

AO World has bought Jessops from Peter Jones, who rescued the chain from administration in 2013. The deal was announced on 24 September and the price was not disclosed. It covers the seven remaining shops and Camera Jungle, the second-hand camera business, which AO will run alongside its musicMagpie resale arm.

For a lot of us Jessops was the first place we held a proper camera, and being able to pick a body up and feel the grip is still worth a great deal. If you’re weighing up a camera like the Nikon above, a shop where you can try before you buy is worth keeping.

Final Thoughts

That is your fortnight. A friendly full-frame camera, an editing tool that takes requests and a gannet at full tilt make for a good start to October.

The two competition stories are the ones to act on. Look through the winning galleries, pick one picture you would love to have taken, and work out what the photographer had to get right to take it.

Tell me in the comments whether you would try Lightroom’s Prompt to Edit on your own photos, and which camera shop you bought your first camera from. I’ll be back in two weeks with the next edition.